Diplomat Aaron David Miller tells a story about the Seeds of Peace program in Maine, where Israeli and Palestinian teenagers come together for three weeks to learn about conflict resolution and to develop relationships with one another.
Miller notes that on the first night that these young people arrive in Maine, they often do not sleep because they are afraid that a person from the other side will come to harm them. Miller explains, “and yet within three weeks, these fourteen and fifteen year-olds, who had been exposed to trauma and real loss as a consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these kids are openly mourning, in fact, crying, because they are going from a bit of the future to the past, because their rabbis, their imams, their journalists, their politicians, will tell them, you can’t talk to the other.”
I thought about this story this week, after I received a DM from a former congregant of mine who is now a graduate student at Yale and has been participating in the Gaza encampments there. She is a young woman who I taught in religious school, who I tutored for her Bat Mitzvah, who I took to Washington DC as a teenager to learn about social justice and Jewish values –she is a young woman who credits me with helping her to recognize the importance of standing up and fighting for the marginalized and oppressed in our world.
In her message to me, this young woman explained how she was saddened to read my posts and sermons. She wrote that she “cannot speak for Columbia, but the students here at Yale have been peaceful and are focusing their efforts only on drawing attention to the thousands of innocent lives lost in Gaza.” She went on to explain how she has a Palestinian classmate who lost forty members of their family to Israeli bombing.
I must be honest. This message broke me. I adore this young woman and her entire family. It broke me to think that I was in any way hurting her or denying the pain and suffering of her friends with what I have been writing.
While I reject so much of the rhetoric of the college protests, while I feel that the protests are a distraction from what really matters to the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, while I feel that much of the oratory at the protests borders on Israel rejectionism and yes, antisemitism, I do recognize that the war in Gaza has taken a horrific toll on the Gazan civilian population. Palestinians are suffering and this war is incredibly tragic. Palestinians have long suffered in the middle east and deserve better from both Israel and most certainly, the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. It hurts me to think that my sermons, my posts, and my writings have in any way denied that reality.
But this is our paradigm to discuss this conflict. We are so mightily defending our own right to feel hurt, our own right to grieve that we are unwilling to recognize the others’ legitimate distress.
The result, as Aaron David Miller notes, is that each side of this conflict believes they have “a monopoly on pain and suffering.”
This week, we are reading Parashat Kedoshim in the book of Leviticus. It is in this portion where we read the maxim, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. Rabbi Akiva notes that this is the central principle in the entire Torah – but it seems impossible.
How could we possibly love our neighbor in such a manner?
The 19th century commentator Rabbi Samuel Reggio notes that the purpose of the words “as yourself” is to remind us that others are like us – that they share our humanity—that they too were made in the image of God. We love our neighbor by seeing ourselves in our neighbors.
But how do we do that – how can we possibly see ourselves in our neighbor when we refuse to speak with them, to have a conversation with them, to have a dialogue with them? How can we see ourselves in our neighbor if we believe that we have a monopoly on pain and suffering?
There are no dialogues taking place on our college campuses right now. Those who side with Palestinians are holding protests and demonizing Israel. Those who support Israel are holding counter-protests and defending Israel. Professors are teaching their own worldviews without even entertaining the possibility that there might be others – or that the situation has multiple perspectives, they teach the conflict as if their view is the only view–
Yes, I understand that college campuses need to be places where free speech is protected and where we should support students’ rights to publicly declare their positions. But what about promoting conversation? Where in all of this are universities nurturing dialogue? Where in all of this are we creating a paradigm by which people can recognize one another’s pain and suffering to see one another’s humanity?
Is it a surprise that rhetoric ends up becoming so dismissive of the others’ right to exist? Without dialogue, without real conversation where people can see and understand one another, it becomes ever easier to disregard the other, to argue against their legitimacy and their right to exist, it becomes ever easier to use language that to you sounds legitimate and non-aggressive but to me sounds like a call for my extermination.
Without dialogue and the ability to truly see one the other, it becomes ever easier to disregard their pain, ever easier to focus on who is at fault instead of who is in turmoil.
Our hearts are big enough, capacious enough, to have compassion for both Israelis and Palestinians, our hearts are big enough , capacious enough, to feel for Muslims and Jews, we can defend Israel and still have empathy for Palestinians—and yes, Palestinians can strive and struggle for statehood and liberation while still having empathy for the pain and the suffering of Israelis, who on October 7th suffered the worst attack on Jews since the Shoah – a malevolent attack of inhuman hideousness.
In the end, it is only this mutual recognition of one another’s suffering, this is the only means by which this conflict ends—
I wrote a message back to the young woman who contacted me this week. I wanted her to know how painful it was to read her message. I wanted her to understand my own perspective on the protests, but more importantly, I wanted to let her know that I have empathy for the Palestinian people who have been pawns in the middle east for too long – abused by deceitful and corrupt leaders and politicians throughout the region, and yes, discriminated against by Israelis who struggle to come to terms with both security and democracy. Israel is the one democracy in the middle east, but that does not mean it does not have its flaws and its moral failures.
And so this is what I wrote:
Dear Julia,
I want to thank you for writing to me and for putting into words so eloquently your sadness in reading my posts about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. As I wrote in my initial response, I am proud of you for standing up for what you believe in. I believe with all my heart that at its core, Judaism is a tradition centered on the defense of the most vulnerable – encouraging us to care for this world and to heal its deep wounds.
As you know, I have been very critical of the protests on campus and have been very concerned about the rhetoric that has been spreading. When students on campus speak of Israelis as colonialists who stole land from an indigenous population or Zionism as a form of racism, I feel strongly that they are delegitimizing Israel. Jews emigrated to Israel because they were refugees – whether from pogroms and antisemitic attacks in 19thcentury Eastern Europe or from the annihilation of six million during the Shoah. Zionism was never a plan to remove another population from its home, but a dream of a people to return to their ancestral homeland.
Of course, there was another people in this land and Israelis have been coming to terms with their own failures in addressing this reality. But overall, Israelis have supported a two-state solution while Palestinian leadership has rejected such plans time and again. It seems that the only acceptable plan to the current Palestinian leadership is one in which Israel ceases to exist as a Jewish state.
You may disagree with me on this. But what I hope you see even through this conversation is the importance of dialogue.
Julia, if there is anything that troubles me about the current conflict, it is the lack of any meangingful dialogue. Israelis and Palestinians are not speaking to one another. Supporters of Israelis and Palestinians are not speaking to one another. The result is that we are each forgetting to recognize one another’s humanity. We are each somehow arguing that we have a monopoly on pain and suffering.
Neither side has a monopoly on pain and suffering. I was in Israel and I visited K’far Azza and Reiim and I saw the horror of October 7th. I spoke to Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, who lost relatives and are in a deep state of trauma. And, yes, I have also been learning about the immense suffering of Gaza’s Palestinians—who live in one of the densest places on earth and are being used as shields by their own government. I recognize that this war has devastated Gaza and that there is horrific suffering there. I also recognize that the war has been devastating to those Palestinians who live in the West Bank.
Julia, I believe that universities need to nurture dialogue – they need to advocate for conversantios between their students and yes, also between their professors. Today, there are too many professors on campus who do nothing but spread their own viewpoints – their own worldview. Why not hire professors who entertain opposing views, who nurture nuance and thoughtfulness instead of the demonization of the other? Why not create programs that remind us of one another’s basic humanity instead of encouraging partisanship and pushing us into corners?
You mentioned that Yale is different, and I hope so – but what I am seeing right now is not nuance and partnership and collaboration – it seems to me that the entire conversation on campus is an argument over who is suffering more. This is not a path to peace.
I adore you and your family and again, I want you to know how proud I am of you. And I want you to know, I am thinking of your friends and colleagues who suffer right now. I see their suffering – I understand that they are in pain. And I believe the more we can do that mutually, the better off we all are.
Sincerely, Rabbi Brian (that’s how I used to be known!!)
Friends, we are taught in this week’s Torah portion to love our neighbor as ourselves – this means seeing ourselves in others – recognizing their humanity – witnessing their pain and suffering – disowning this horrific idea that any of us have a monopoly on pain.
Those kids who attend the Seeds of Peace camp should not be a fringe group – they should not be the exception to how we are handling the conflict in the middle east, they should be a model for what we create on our campuses and in our politics.
For at the end of the day, it is only by seeing the other fully and completely that we find ways to live together.
May we all bear witness to each others’ suffering and may it inspire us to care for this very broken world.
Shabbat Shalom.
